Last week, Kate Ivey-Williams, the Head of UCD on my programme, asked me: “What do you think your role is as a designer?” I said: “Errr… I design products that are easy to use… errr… I realise that’s a rubbish answer…” Kate saved me: “Don’t worry, I put you on the spot” But even so, as a designer you should be ready to be put on the spot because: If you aren’t able to explain what you do, it’s much harder for your teammates and stakeholders to value what...

Adobe employed 31,360 people worldwide at the close of fiscal 2025, up 651 from a year earlier and the slowest headcount growth in a decade. Revenue per employee reached roughly $757,800, among the highest of any large software company. This post covers Adobe’s workforce size, growth trend, geographic split, role mix, diversity figures, and the revenue efficiency behind them. Adobe Employee Statistics – TL;DR Adobe had 31,360 employees as of November 28, 2025, a 2.12% increase over f...

We haven’t had a tier list here for a while, so I thought it’d be fun to do one to celebrate 2026-07-11 . Japanese convenience stores are ubiquitous, tasty, and a cultural institution in their own right. I’ve decided not to include places we haven’t been to in a separate list this time; maybe I’ll add to this eventually. It’s worth mentioning this tier list only compares Japanese outlets, and where Japanese kombinis have branched out overseas. Including other countries in this l...

As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase? My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or games like The Witness ) would say “obviously you have to understand it completely, otherwise you can’t do good work”. I’d also guess that people who work on large codebases with high-turnover teams (say, the Google web search backend or GitHub) would say “obviously you can’t understand it completely, you just ha...

The goal of this post is to answer a simple question: why are the following two definitions of the vector dot product in Euclidean space [1] equivalent for vectors \vec{a} and \vec{b} : Component definition: \vec{a}\cdot\vec{b}=\sum_{i=1}^{n}a_i b_i Geometric definition: \vec{a}\cdot\vec{b}=|\vec{a}||\vec{b}|cos(\theta) , where |\vec{a}| is the magnitude of \vec{a} and is the angle between the vectors’ directions Here’s a graphical depiction of our vectors (focusing on...

Recent conflicts in Iran and Ukraine show that modern warfare does not wait for ideal communications, clear GPS signals, or manual replanning from a ground station. Modern strike systems must operate through jamming, degraded links, and changing target conditions while coordinating with ISR and relay assets in real time. To begin addressing this challenge, Shield AI and Destinus partnered to bring Hivemind mission autonomy software onto the Destinus Hornet platform, paving the way for integratio...

Two editorials in the July issue of the Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery ask about the decay and future of the organization itself. Jim Larus, editor-in-chief of the CACM, writes  Wither ACM? Publish and Perish? ACM no longer has broad appeal as a professional organization, does not advance many members’ careers, and may not be a valuable affiliation in a more diverse technical world...It is time to recognize that ACM has shifted from functioning as a professional s...

0.0 Context Setting It is Tuesday 7 July in Portland, Oregon, where we are totally not living through what could be described as William Gibson’s Jackpot. I mean, the minority senate leader might be in a persistent vegetative state and there’s like a non-zero chance there’s a bunch of techbros going around lobbying for him to become a McConneLLM and thus be uploaded for all eternity, and they’re probably fighting with another band of techbros who see him as the ideal candidate for a...

I have been on X for a long time. Like most people who post regularly, I have a gut feeling for what might interest people. I post in the morning. Longer posts seem to do better. But gut feelings are not measurements. And until recently, digging into your own posting data meant either clicking around the web UI or writing custom scripts. Neither is particularly friendly when you want to ask ad hoc questions with an AI assistant. X recently launched hosted MCP servers: official endpoints ...

“ Venice: The Basin of San Marco on Ascension Day ” by Canaletto, via the National Gallery of London . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at adults living with their parents, Samsung’s profits, Native American data centers, Puerto Rico’s electricity grid, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. Housekeeping items:...

Speaking of trains, I tell a story of Winter to my friend, of the train that stopped in the village station on an evening so cold my fellow passengers and I could see our breaths. The local pub offered refuge to all those who wanted to sit in the warmth. I wanted to feel a bit more of the cold – to see my breath; to feel all the parts of me. Anxiety warms the cold, too. Reflecting on the story of Winter, in the cold, there was nothing but warmth. My hands were likely almost immovable, frozen b...

Thamires Lima, a research professor in chemical engineering at Drexel University, studies the properties of thick, viscous liquids — think honey or molasses, though in a lab you’re more likely to find polypropylene or crude oil. Using a method called extensional rheology, Lima stretches liquids between metal plates to find the force that makes them flow. A few years ago, she was conducting a… Source Thamires Lima, a research professor in chemical engineering at Drexel University, studie...

OpenAI's latest flagship model hit general availability this morning , and comes in three sizes: Luna, Terra, and Sol (from smallest to largest). The new models are priced per 1M input/output tokens as Luna $1/$6, Terra $2.50/$15, Sol $5/$30. For comparison, the Claude Opus series are $5/$25 and the Claude Fable 5 is $10/$50, but price-per-million tokens doesn't tell us much now that the number of reasoning tokens can differ so much between models for the same task. All three models have a...

The engine is revving after years of war.  ... Read More The engine is revving after years of war.  ... Read More The engine is revving after years of war.  ... ... Read More Read More

Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day use. more… Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences trying local LLMs for coding. She compares them using two standard tasks, and tries out the most promising model for day-to-day use. more… Birgitta Böckeler now reports on her recent experiences t...

There have been several security incidents lately that involved compromising GitHub Actions workflows. This has led some to say " GitHub Actions is the weakest link " in publishing and to GitHub publishing a GitHub Actions security roadmap update . But saying it's an issue and acknowledging the fact is one thing, but you still need to do the mitigation work today so you are not going to be the next headline. So this post is going to outline 3 things to do so you can publish to PyPI securely w...

I like reading letters for particular persons. You and I talk about simulating each other. I've got a little Jon (not a Lil Jon) inside me. He tells me about chemistry, and systems, and to not take it all so seriously, dude. That voice is one of the wisest and best parts of me. Thanks. I can't simulate just anybody. Only high-fidelity training data creates simulations, and we've shared the human experience. I cherish our training data -- years of spats, riffs, tiffs, spills, wins, and shenan...

We compared 100 human annotated traces against automated eval systems. Here's what we found. We compared 100 human annotated traces against automated eval systems. Here's what we found.

While going through the Go generics proposal , I got curious about how the compiler implements it. Compilers usually handle generics in one of two ways: With full monomorphization , the compiler turns generic code into concrete, type-specific code. It generates a separate version for every set of type arguments the program uses. Rust works this way, and so do C++ templates. With type erasure , the compiler keeps one shared version of the generic code and replaces the type paramete...

The QuadRF (pictured above) a phased-array radio built around a Raspberry Pi 5 and an FPGA board with picosecond-level timing. It does advanced signal processing and beamforming. It can see WiFi through walls and track drones in flight. If the open source community can come up with something like this, just imagine what governments are capable of. When you plug a computer into a network, tools like Wireshark can show all the hidden traffic you might not even know is there. WiFi packe...

With the 150th interview of People and Blogs now live, it’s officially time to downsize my online presence again. My digital life follows a somewhat regular rhythm and I alternate through phases of expansion, where I buy domain names, ship new projects, start newsletters, and chase a million ideas, and phases of contraction, where everything happens in reverse: domains are left to expire, projects are archived, newsletters are deleted, services are cancelled. And my recent decoupling from t...

I haven’t had time to blog in a while, I have a lot to say, but have been doing a lot of things and so haven’t gotten words down in a while. One of those things in the past few weeks has been picking back up my Rue project. I’m really excited for what it’s turning into, even though it’s not really ready for anyone else to use just yet. So go take a look if you want, but don’t expect anything amazing, it’s very much a work in progress. Anyway, one of the things that got me bac...

Previously I opined that Valve was about to win the console generation . I couldn't have possibly predicted that both Microsoft and Sony would just self-sabotage so hard that they're both going to lose. Between Microsoft's decimation of the Xbox division , slaughtering off the IdTech team , and continued increases of Xbox hardware prices ; there's nothing to really be excited about with the Xbox. Sure their most recent presentation showed off a bunch of exclusives, but none of them...